Connected TV Advertising Trends for 2023: Part two
Live sports broadcasts on streaming platforms are driving the growth in connected TV advertising.
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To round up the second part of our 2023 connected TV advertising trends overview:
- More live sports on streaming platforms in 2023 will bring huge and engaged audiences, presenting significant CTV ad opportunities for brands
- Growing CTV market fragmentation will require adtech tools that can measure performance across channels
- Catch up TV morphing into streaming services, providing more opportunities for CTV ad growth
Be sure to read our first instalment of this two-part trends overview, where we cover CTV growth expectations for the coming year, the increasing ubiquity of ad-supported video on demand, and the CTV ad spend behaviour of CPG brands.
As we discussed in the first instalment of this two-part feature, global ad spend for connected TV (CTV) is on the rise. One factor that could help boost CTV ad spend in 2023 is the trend for streaming live sport. Live events, especially sports, are the last remaining linear TV ad stronghold; but with Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Channel 4’s All 4 among those upping live sport content, that may be set to change.
Live sport and the huge audiences it attracts present a chance for brand building, but on CTV there will be greater opportunity for targeting and segmentation. In the second instalment of our two-part feature, we look at this alongside two other CTV trends.
Live sport video-on-demand is here to stay
Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Channel 4’s All 4 are among the streaming services who have jumped aboard the live sports bandwagon, which surely makes the CTV advertising market even more attractive to brands in the new year.
Popular sports bring huge global audiences, and – according to Bloomberg – Apple is exploring building an advertising network for live television. After securing the rights to stream the US Major League Soccer, it seems Apple wants to monetise them beyond subscription revenue.
A further reminder of streaming platforms’ growing foothold in live sport comes in the form of Amazon Prime TV’s hosting of English Premier League matches – including the Christmas holiday fixtures after the World Cup. Those 10 matches in December are a firm reminder of live sports’ influence on driving traffic to streaming platforms going into the new year.
The opportunity is therefore immense for advertisers to shift more spend to CTV and adapt creatives for interactive and shoppable experiences to take advantage of how viewers consume live events.
Increasingly fragmented connected TV landscape
Another ad trend set to gain momentum in 2023 involves dealing with growing audience fragmentation across multiple streaming platforms and CTV. How do brands reach people watching across multiple streaming sites, linear TV, and digital platforms? And how do they measure performance across channels?
Participants in the CTV ecosystem include smart TV device manufacturers such as Samsung, standalone media players like Amazon Fire and Roku, over the top (OTT) providers like Netflix, and content distribution platforms such as BitCentral.
“All of them have a heavy hand in the market because they own (but do not always share) consumer data,” says Dmitry Sverdlik, CEO of martech/adtech software development lab Xenoss, in his company’s blog. “To gain full visibility into CTV ad performance, ad platforms have to integrate data from multiple sources. What makes CTV measurement even harder is that no single player dominates the smart TV OS market or the OTT market.”
Against such a backdrop, adtech tools to help brands measure their ad performance across multiple CTV devices and platforms will no doubt increase in demand. This should be an area of focus in 2023, as CTV continues to disrupt the linear TV ad world.
Consolidation of streaming platforms
Catch-up TV platforms are morphing into streaming sites, and 2023 starts with the newly launched ITVX as a prime example of this evolution.
Replacing the ITV Hub, ITVX launched in December in time for the football World Cup, with ad-supported streaming of more than 10,000 free hours of on-demand content. The plan is to provide more content on a Premium paid-for tier, with weekly new shows that become available before they appear on linear channels.
This is further evidence CTV will be a valuable channel for brands in the year ahead. For more insights into the wider TV landscape, check out our key takeaways from the Mediatel Future of TV Advertising Global event.